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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Hypermiling, Hypoconsuming.

Avoiding jack rabbit starts and coasting into stop signs can greatly improve the MPG your car gets. These are among a long list of hypermiling techniques that, when carefully applied, have enabled attentive drivers to achieve MPG levels that greatly exceed their car's official MPG rating.

Let's look at these hypermiling numbers from a GPM perspective. How much gas do these MPG improvements save?

First, let's translate hypermiling to a gas consumption metric. Let's call extreme performance in saving gas "hypoconsuming." Hypermiling and hypoconsuming are simply mathematical conversions of each other that depend on whether gallons of gas are put in the denominator (hypermiling) or numerator (hypoconsuming).

Here are some high (but achievable) levels of MPG and the amount of gas that is consumed over 100 and 1,000 miles:

In contests to achieve the most impressive levels of MPG, hypermiling with highly efficient vehicles yields very large MPG improvements and very high levels of final MPG. But, as hypermiling figures become more impressive, hypoconsuming figures become less impressive. (The improvement from 200 to 250 MPG yields a 12 ounce reduction in gas use over 100 miles.)